The Luckless Office Drone’s Life, and Afterlife, of Benumbed Desperation

Do those sunny Broadway songfests make you want to gag? Would you rather go to the dentist than come to the cabaret, old chum? Maybe you secretly think that “Spring Awakening” is too treacly, despite the teenage sex-and-suicide angle?

If you could conceivably answer any of those questions affirmatively, please consider a visit to “Adding Machine,” the impossibly bleak, improbably brilliant little musical that screeched open at the Minetta Lane Theater on Monday night.

This uncompromising adaptation of Elmer Rice’s 1923 play, about an all-American loser turned killer named Mr. Zero, seems to take place at the bottom of a dank, dark well, where mole-like little men and women fight desperately for air. As they shuffle mechanically through their woebegone lives, squinting into the smoky gloom around them, these luckless characters never seem to shake the dazed glint in their eyes or lose the cruel little folds at the corners of their downturned mouths.

Mr. Zero, his harridan of a wife and his mousy would-be mistress do not remotely resemble the chipper, eager-to-please types you might associate with musical theater of the more populist and ingratiating kind, high schoolers triumphing over racism in Baltimore, say, or the merry gag-meisters of Mel Brooks or Monty Python. Freaks on any Broadway stage, they would look more at home slouched over a bar, droning out their grievances as they nurse a cheap whiskey, sometime around noon.

But without being even remotely energetic, inspiring or even likable, these weary strivers are somehow immensely lovable, embodied as they are with ferocious truth by an astoundingly good cast of virtual unknowns. And as this jet-black musical comedy trudges along behind Mr. Zero on his odyssey from the hell on earth that is his life to the hell up above that is, well, heaven, it radiates the unmistakable heat, the entrancing light, of aesthetic inspiration.

It has come from Chicago, whence also arrived this season’s Broadway firestorm “August: Osage County,” in case you hadn’t heard. First produced at the small Next Theater, “Adding Machine” was named best musical at the city’s major theater kudos, the Joseph Jefferson Awards.

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From left, Joe Farrell, Joel Hatch and Amy Warren in Adding Machine, a darkly satirical examination of the abuses of capitalism in the early 20th century.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

As was the case with “August,” the Chicago production of “Adding Machine” has been imported with its impeccable cast and creative team intact, a wise choice since it was  and is  remarkable for its assurance and stylistic cohesion. Words and music, design, direction and performances combine seamlessly to conjure a vision of American life in the 1920s at odds with that decade’s popular image as a happy-go-lucky era of boisterous good times ended only by the big, bad Depression. It is a vision that feels eerily in tune, I’m almost sorry to say, with our own unsettled economy.

Directed with clinical precision by David Cromer, with significant contributions from Takeshi Kata (sets), Keith Parham (lighting) and Kristine Knanishu (costumes), the musical is impressive in its fidelity to both the crisp letter and the mordant spirit of Rice’s Expressionist play. His darkly satiric view of capitalism as a brutal, inhuman enterprise emerges with its fierce edge intact, as does his unflattering view of the economic order’s putative victims. (One unusual number climaxes with a hail of racist epithets.)

But in translating Rice’s comedy-drama into music and lyrics  while not through-sung, this 90-minute show has just a few pure-dialogue patches  Joshua Schmidt and Jason Loewith infuse it with an emotional texture that amplifies the tension and enriches the savage humor without softening its piteous message about mankind’s sorry state.

The bravura opening number, sung, or rather brayed, by Cyrilla Baer’s Mrs. Zero, sets a wearying stream of pointless bedtime chatter to a jagged, insistent melody; it’s the act of nagging translated into music that, fittingly, gets under your skin and stays there. (The song has rattled around in my head ever since I first saw the show, more than a year ago.)

For the next scene, set at Mr. Zero’s office, where he works as a bookkeeper tallying sums by hand in a dim basement, Mr. Schmidt finds similarly precise musical expression for the numbing tedium of the job. Mr. Zero and two male associates, their faces glowing a lurid green under plastic visors, mutter their daydreams aloud (a fantasy of promotion for Mr. Zero; beer and girls for the others), as their female assistants read out long streams of numbers, numbers, numbers in counterpoint rhythms. (Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Loewith collaborated on the superb libretto.)

Mr. Zero’s hollowed-out soul leaves little room for anything but these numbers. He’s blind to the doggy-eyed devotion of his timid assistant, Daisy (Amy Warren), although both linger inwardly over a rare moment of mutual happiness they shared at a company picnic. When it turns out his boss has other ideas for him  namely his replacement by a newfangled adding machine  Mr. Zero’s shrunken mind cracks up.

In this dominant role, Joel Hatch has the blank, beady-eyed stare of a man hypnotized by dreary routine into total emotional disengagement. An automaton with a beer gut, Mr. Zero is so dazed by his violent response to his dismissal that he trudges home anyway, as if it were any old Tuesday, to take more guff from the wife for being late. It’s a marvelously sustained and contained performance, without a shred of false sentiment.

It is grotesquely funny too, when Mr. Zero arrives in the afterlife to discover that celestial bliss ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. “What kinda dump is this anyway?” he asks, outraged at the riffraff they let in, his pinched moral view firmly intact.

Ms. Baer is equally idiomatic as the crabbed, cranky Mrs. Zero, her wonderful waddle expressing truculence and disgruntlement as vividly as the bleating voice. (Ms. Baer’s bleat may be unforgettable, but she’s a seriously good singer too.) Ms. Warren, who has the most sympathetic role, as the soggy-hearted Daisy, performs a period pop pastiche number, “I’d Rather Watch You,” with a lovely, sad grace.

Daisy’s unrequited love for Mr. Zero inspires her to toss away her own life to follow him upstairs. Unhappily for her, Mr. Zero doesn’t have what it takes to make a go at romance in heaven either, even with a sumptuous string orchestra to prod him on. Miserable on earth, Daisy is even more bitterly disappointed in the Elysian Fields. Forlorn again, her dream of celluloid-style love dashed to bits, she looks out at us and wanly observes, “I might as well be alive.”

As that delicious moment suggests, the insistently bleak “Adding Machine” will be nobody’s idea of a giddy, escapist good time. But its unsentimental vision is executed with a commitment that is bracingly tonic. And its bitter tang leaves you with the significant consolation of viewing our own seemingly ever-darkening world with a measure of equanimity.